Black Hawk Down (2001) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error 160 elite U.S. soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis. Director: From $9.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 39 titles created 03 Sep 2011 a list of 23 titles created 18 Mar 2013 a list of 35 titles created 12 Jun 2013 a list of 23 titles created 08 Jan 2014 a list of 35 titles created 5 months ago Title: Black Hawk Down (2001) 7.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 2 Oscars.

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Director: Kathryn Bigelow A grizzled tank commander makes tough decisions as he and his crew fight their way across Germany in April, 1945. Director: David Ayer Edit Storyline Action/war drama based on the best-selling book detailing a near-disastrous mission in Somalia on October 3, 1993. On this date nearly 100 U.S. Army Rangers, commanded by Capt. Mike Steele, were dropped by helicopter deep into the capital city of Mogadishu to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. This led to a large and drawn-out firefight between the Army Ranges, US Special Forces, and hundreds of Somali gunmen; resulting in the destruction of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters. The film focuses on the heroic efforts of various Rangers to get to the downed black hawks, centering on SSG. Eversmann, leading the Ranger unit Chalk Four to the first black hawk crash site, Chief Warrant Officer Durant who was captured after being the only survivor of the second black hawk crash, as well as many others who were involved. Written by Matthew Patay: revised by Corbin L.

Reporting for Duty Christmas 2001 See more » Genres: Rated R for intense, realistic, graphic war violence, and for language | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 18 January 2002 (USA) See more » Also Known As: La caída del halcón negro See more » Filming Locations: $193,021 (USA) (4 January 2002) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia The donkey that Sgt. Ed Yurek briefly pets almost didn't make it into the film because of budget cuts. In fact, during the rewriting and re-editing of the script, screenwriter Ken Nolan found a note by Ridley Scott saying, "I miss the donkey". The donkey was eventually kept. See more » Goofs when CPT Steele calls out SFC Hooten to point out the safety of his weapon, it is obvious that when Hooten turns around, the right side of his rifle is facing outward but when Steele's finger is pointing at the safety lever, the left side of the rifle is facing outward See more » Quotes See more » Crazy Credits There are no studio logos at the beginning and the only opening credit is the title.

See more » Connections Courtesy of Reachout International Records, Inc.

(R.O.I.R.) By Arrangement with Ocean Park Music Group Tells it like it is 26 November 2004 | by BettieTeese (Australia) – See all my reviews I'm not a fan of war movies usually,but when i sat down to watch Black Hawk Down,i couldn't turn it off.Heres a war movie which doesn't sugar coat.There is no crappy dialogue,no soppy love story tie ins,just the real deal,brutal battle scenes,the gruesome reality of war.Black Hawk Down is based on a true story,the bloody battle at Somalia and it leaves one drained.Its confronting,and exposes war in its true light-there's nothing glamorous to see.In two hours and a bit the viewer is able to imagine being there at the horrible battleground,and suffering like the soldiers did.It really makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be in a free country,relatively peaceful,and not having our lives threatened every second of the day.Everything about BHD is right; the setting of the film,the Somalians,the American soldiers going through hell,the brutality,the battle,the fatalities.Not for the faint hearted,or weak stomached,but a truly powerful,compelling motion picture.Ridley Scott takes the viewer on an imaginative journey through

 Black Hawk Down and appeals to our emotions.A brutal,yet bearable war film.

146 of 186 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Black Hawk Down: naked propaganda masquerading as entertainment - World Socialist Web Site World Socialist Web Site Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) Black Hawk Down: naked propaganda masquerading as entertainment By Ann Talbot 19 February 2002 Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down sets out to tell the story of a US military debacle. On October 3, 1993, Somali gunmen brought down two Black Hawk helicopters as American Special Forces tried to seize the warlord Farah Aideed. During a night of fighting 18 US soldiers died and 73 were wounded. One pilot was taken hostage and CNN showed scenes of American dead being paraded through the streets of Mogadishu. Within months the Clinton administration pulled US forces out of Somalia. Actor Josh Hartnett, who plays Army Ranger Staff Sgt.

Matt Eversmann in the film, expressed the hope that after seeing Black Hawk Down, “People will think twice about sending our troops on the ground into a land that we don’t know anything about, to be slaughtered.” Hartnett, however, seems to have been in a different film from the one that Ridley Scott was making. The character of Scott’s film is indicated by the welcome it got from an audience of right wing politicians and military top brass when it premiered in Washington. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz declared Black Hawk Down to be a “powerful film.” His fellow film enthusiasts included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Army Secretary Tom White, and Iran-Contra plotter Oliver North. Unlike his earlier film G.I. Jane, Black Hawk Down received the full co-operation of the US military. The actors went through a period of intensive training at Fort Bragg and were, Scott proudly declared, “traumatised” by the time they arrived in Morocco for the start of filming. To get that kind of co-operation Scott had to allow the military a veto over every aspect of the film.

As a result, Black Hawk Down is not a genuine artistic exploration of the experience of US intervention in Somalia, but a blatant glorification of US militarism. Scott does not seem to have had to compromise any artistic principles to achieve this result. Interviewed on BBC radio about Black Hawk Down, he repeatedly referred to the US army as a “militia”—as though America’s professional army, maintained with the highest level of military spending in the world, could be compared to the 18th century volunteers who fought for American independence, or the union army that defeated the breakaway by the southern slave-holding states in the 19th century. This was no mere slip of the tongue. When audience members at a discussion session prior to a special BAFTA screening in London politely questioned the film’s attitude to US militarism, Scott rounded on the chairman BBC film critic, Andrew Collins, in the manner of an interrogator, demanding to know where he stood on American military intervention post-September 11. Scott has made his name with films like Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator.

If they did not tax the audience’s intellect or artistic sensibility, they at least offered a reliable evening’s entertainment due in part to their powerful visual imagery. Black Hawk Down uses many of the same visual techniques perfected in his earlier works, but with the difference that this is a film with a definite non-artistic agenda. Scott is not simply telling a story, he is propagandising for a particular political position. The film was finished before the September 11 attack on the World Trade Tower, but its spirit still reflects the increasingly reactionary outlook of a section of the American elite. It makes for a poor film, which fails even in its own terms as an example of the war or action genre. All Scott’s trademarks are there. Mogadishu did not provide an opportunity for rain—always a favourite image with Scott—but the aircraft hangar where the troops were billeted offers a suitably post-industrial setting. Helicopters and colourful swirls of smoke were available in plenty. But rather than producing evocative imagery, Scott’s style has been reduced to a series of clichéd visual tricks. At his best Scott narrates a story through visual imagery, using spectacular action scenes to rush the audience over the ever-present holes in the plot.

In Black Hawk Down this technique fails. What some critics have praised as a vivid account of “the fog of war” is in fact a confusion of narrative. This is in marked contrast to Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down,* on which the film is supposedly based. Bowden goes to considerable pains to track the events of the 15-hour battle through the streets of Mogadishu and make them clear to the reader. He does this to a great extent by identifying the participants. We learn who they are, why they joined the army and about their families. Scott has carefully avoided this aspect of the book. Character is always pared down to a minimum in his films. While this may work with two women in a car, with a hundred or so men in a military convoy it presents problems. In Black Hawk Down character is so minimal that even having the soldiers’ names on their helmets does little to distinguish one man from another. Ironically one of the few soldiers to stand out is the character played by Ewan McGregor. Unfortunately it is not through McGregor’s efforts that the character is made recognisable.

Even the best actor would have had trouble bringing these characters to life because their dialogue is so limited, rarely extending beyond “f***” and “hu-ah.” “Hu-ah” is a word that appears to mean “yes” and can be delivered in one of two ways—with enthusiasm or without—according to circumstances. Even three years in drama school may not equip an actor to wring much of such limited vocalisation. McGregor’s character stands out because he was originally based on Specialist John Stebbins. When Stebbins was convicted of child molesting, the name had to be changed in an effort to protect the army’s reputation. The new name, “Grimes” was grafted on later and is pronounced at every opportunity for no apparent reason other than to make clear that he is not Stebbins. Since the characters are ill-defined, it is impossible to engage with any of them. When parts of their anatomy are blasted to a bloody pulp, this has an emotional impact equivalent to the deaths of the virtual figures in a computer game. The result is a profoundly dehumanising and dehumanised film. A number of reviewers have suggested that the film is racist. Certainly the soldiers shown in the film are almost uniformly white.

This absence of black faces on the American side is not in itself an indication of racism, however, but is merely an accurate picture of the Delta Force and Rangers. There were only two African-Americans among the Rangers stationed in Mogadishu. In this respect the film merely reflects the racially exclusive nature of the elite units of the US army. What does leave a nasty taste in one’s mouth is Scott’s treatment of the one African-American soldier in the film, Specialist Kurth, played by Gabriel Casseus. This character’s role is merely to grin amiably, like the minor black characters such as servants in old Hollywood films. But the most appalling aspect of Scott’s film is his depiction of the Somalis as an undifferentiated, screaming horde. Not only does Bowden’s book tell us about the American participants on October 3; he has gone to some lengths to interview Somalis who were there that day. We learn about their backgrounds, what they witnessed and what they did just as we do about the Americans. Scott’s attitude is very different. The role of the Somalis in the film is to die in anonymous waves like the Hollywood Indians of old westerns. The film is shot entirely from the point of view of the American soldiers.

We do not learn about the vastly disproportionate number of Somalis killed and injured on October 3. For example, when a helicopter comes down the whole descent and eventual crash is depicted in intricate detail, except for the child who was crushed in the house it destroyed. Since Bowden had already got this material together Scott’s omission is deliberate. Throughout the film no Somali character is shown in a positive light. Only two are differentiated from the mass. One is Osman Atto, a Somali businessman, and Aideed’s financier, whose sole function in the film, is to sit glowering over a glass of tea in an atmospherically lit room. The other is an unnamed gunman played by a large black man in a black bandanna. Who this character is remains obscure. If he was meant to be Aideed, a short, middle aged man, grey haired and balding, it was a poor representation. No such person features in Bowden’s book. He is Scott’s own invention and he has created a character that has little to do with Mogadishu. It is the stereotype of a violent black gang leader, who could have been slotted into an equally stereotyped vision of an inner city anywhere in the world.

The primary value of Scott’s film for the military and political leaders is ideological. Black Hawk Down is an exercise in the manipulation of mass consciousness. Scott is attempting to change the public perception of what happened in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993. At the time it was widely understood as a humiliating defeat for the US military. The few seconds of film CNN screened showing the mutilated body of an American soldier being dragged through the streets shocked the US public, who could not understand why these young Americans had been sent to Mogadishu. CNN had 40 minutes of film from a Somali stringer. It showed only 30 seconds and of that only 2.5 seconds included the dead soldier. So powerful was this image, however, which was of a very different kind to the slick Hollywood depiction of death and injury shown by Scott, that it made the use of ground troops on this scale politically impossible for almost a decade. It is noticeable that although Scott uses images suggestive of military videos taken from spy planes and helicopters—the entire action that day was filmed, making it what must be the most thoroughly recorded battle in history—he does not show the mutilation of the soldier or attempt to reproduce the imagery of news footage.

Instead Scott shows us alternative images of US soldiers who, although wounded, are heroic until the very moment they are killed. He is attempting to create a new memory that will overcome the widespread hostility to American soldiers being killed on imperialist missions abroad. The filmmakers, the right wing politicians and the US military who backed it hope that for those who see Black Hawk Down the sanitised, choreographed violence of Scott’s film will become the image of the October 1993 incident they remember. What then really happened in Mogadishu and what is Scott’s film hiding? To begin at the beginning, why were the American forces in Somalia? According to Scott’s film they were there as part of the UN mission and their role was to get food aid through to the starving. This was not the case. The famine was already over by the time US troops arrived. Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down and the book Me Against My Brother, by another American journalist, Scott Peterson,** both make this clear. Neither of them is anti-American or left-wing in their political sympathies. Peterson points out that the number of famine deaths had peaked in October to November 1991.

President George Bush did not launch Operation Restore Hope until December 1992. In any case the 30,000 combat troops, attack helicopters and warships that Bush despatched were scarcely suitable for an aid mission. A scene at the beginning of the film suggests that the UN prevented US troops from protecting aid convoys. Again this is untrue. The mission was handed over to UN control in May 1993, but effectively the US remained in the driving seat. Although 23 nations participated in the UN operation, political and military control was in American hands throughout. US Admiral Jonathan Howe was in charge of the whole operation. His staff and all the most senior military officials were American. The US troops sent to Mogadishu were not intended to help the aid effort. Among the Rangers were members of the secret Delta force, a fact that in deference to the military Scott never spells out. The presence of General Garrison in Mogadishu was kept secret because his military background in special operations would have made it all too clear that the purposes of the task force was not humanitarian. Garrison had commanded the Phoenix Program, whose task was to kill Vietnamese village leaders who were thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong.

Since then he had conducted covert operations all over the world. In the weeks leading up to October 3, the Rangers had earned themselves the enmity of the civilian population of Mogadishu. Three times a day Black Hawks would harass the city’s residents flying along the streets below roof level before soaring back up to hundreds of feet in the air. This activity was popular with the Rangers who told Bowden it was like riding a roller coaster. Sometimes they would hover low over flimsy shacks blowing them apart, or over a crowded market place tearing people’s clothes from their bodies or even ripping babies out of their mothers’ arms, in a practice the pilots called “rotor washing.” Even before October 3 the US military were casually brutal about the number of dead and injured among the Somalis, whom they referred to contemptuously as “Sammys” or “Skinnies.” They regularly lobbed mortar shells into the city from the UN compound. They hit hospitals and homes killing an unknown number of civilians. No attempt was even made to count the number of casualties when troops opened fire on crowds.

The single action that did more than any other to cement Somali hostility and to unite the different clan factions in Mogadishu against the Americans was the massacre of a meeting of Habr Gedir clan elders on July 12, 1993. They had convened their meeting to discuss peace proposals Admiral Howe had put to them the previous day. Cobra gunships armed with TOW missiles and 20 mm cannons attacked the house, with ground troops finishing off the wounded. When the mission on October 3 went wrong the US troops found themselves in a situation that was largely of their own making. Bowden is very candid about the extent of civilian casualties on October 3. He describes how the American troops opened fire on civilians as they put it “mowing down whole crowds of Sammies,” laughing when they blew a woman apart. He also admits that they took women and children hostage. Scott’s film does not show the hostages and pays no attention to civilian casualties. Nor does Scott admit, as Bowden does, that the Rangers went to pieces under fire and that their discipline broke down. The average age of the Rangers was 19, with many almost fresh off the high school football pitch having never been under fire before.

Bowden notes that one of soldiers joined the army because his wife was pregnant and he needed a better-paid job with a health plan. Scott never demonstrates this amount of interest in his characters. He is concerned only to manufacture a glorious event out of a military debacle. He does not want his audience to dwell on the tragedy of these wasted lives. He certainly does not want us to ask who was responsible for getting these young men killed and maimed. Why did these young men die? To answer that Scott would have had to examine the background to the US intervention in Somalia. This is the most glaring omission in the film. There is no hint of America’s long-term involvement in the area and its role in creating the tragic situation in Somalia through its support for the vicious dictator Siad Barre. The US had supported Siad Barre since the mid-1970s. Until then Somalia had been a Soviet ally. When neighbouring Ethiopia overthrew Emperor Hailie Selassie, the Soviet Union shifted its support to the new Ethiopian regime.

The US government took the opportunity to form an alliance with Somalia, pouring millions of pounds worth of sophisticated weaponry into this backward country, because it offered a base on the strategically important sea lanes leading into the Middle East. Siad Barre exacerbated clan rivalries and was responsible for causing famine by devastating the farming districts. During the late 1970s and 1980s Somalia became the largest recipient of aid in Africa, but most of this money went on military spending. By the late 1980s Somalia was awash with arms. When rebellion broke out in the late 1980s, the US backed Siad Barre as he ruthlessly suppressed opposition. In 1988 he razed the city of Hargiesa to the ground in an attempt to destroy the rival Isaaq clan. In these years every young Somali learned to use an assault rifle. In 1991 Siad Barre was overthrown. A unit of US Marines had to be diverted from the Gulf to evacuate the US embassy, which was by then the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.

The American landing a year later was an attempt to recover this strategic base on the Horn of Africa and to consolidate the Middle Eastern gains that the US had made in the Gulf War. This bloody intervention proved unsuccessful at the time, but the present US administration has shown that it is eager to complete Bush senior’s unfinished business in the Middle East. Somalia is on the list of targets in the “war against terror”. While it may be lower down the list than Iraq, a repeat visit can be expected. For all its superficiality, Scott’s film takes on a sombre meaning in this context. Film is the most deceptive of media, because it conveys the illusion of reality so strongly. It shows us what we think we can see or, ideally, what a good director thinks and sees in his mind’s eye. If he does his job well that is how we think we see the world thereafter. Scott has been employed like a political hack to make a world audience think differently and lay the ghosts, Somali and American, of October 3, 1993.

* Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, Bantam Press, 1999 ** Scott Peterson, Me Against My Brother, Routledge, 2001 Black Hawk Down (2001) - Decent Films Decent Films A- SDG The shadow of September 11 will not always hang over the movies, but as I watched Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down it seemed to be everywhere: an ominous column of smoke rising from a city skyline; people watching helplessly via video screens as a catastrophe unfolds before their eyes in real time; enemies striking an unexpected and terrible blow that seems to be as bad as anything can possibly be — followed by a second, equally terrible blow. Two helicopters down in the streets of Mogadishu; two towers down in the streets of Manhattan. 2001, Columbia. Directed by Ridley Scott. Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard. Artistic/Entertainment Value About These Ratings What is it that a film like this offers us in times like these? Understanding? Catharsis? Perspective? The words seem irrelevant.

Black Hawk Down is the story of a disaster: an operation that began as a supposedly routine, 30-minute snatch-and-grab aimed at capturing high-ranking enemy officers, but spiraled out of control into a desperate 15-hour ground war merely to survive and escape. Some 120 American troops were engaged by thousands of Somali militia, civilians, even women and children — a whole city, really. It was the longest, largest firefight for American troops since Vietnam; eighteen Americans, and over 500 Somalis, were slain, and any number on both sides wounded. A few subtitles explain briefly the reasons for the American presence in Somalia in 1993. They seem to be good reasons. The country was stricken by terrible famine, thousands of Somalis were dying of starvation, and U.N. food shipments were being routinely waylaid by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who opposed U.N. involvement and sought to maintain his own power. At the same time, the film suggests that American resolve wasn’t what it should have been: The Clinton administration initially alloted a mere three weeks for the military to restore order, and denied requests for armored vehicles and other ordnance.

We also gather that the enemy may have been underestimated. As the powerful Black Hawks swoop in low toward Mogadishu, we see a young Somali boy watching from a rooftop vantage point — then scrambling down with a phone in his hand, making a call that will bring out militia fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenade lauchers capable of crippling a Black Hawk. The film hints, too, at the long-term consequences of the disaster: President Clinton, unwilling to risk further loss of American life, immediately called off the humanitarian mission and pulled the troops out of the ongoing Somalian conflict. Afterwards, the prospect of sending troops into other foreign trouble zones (e.g., Rwanda, Zaire, Bosnia) faced a chilly reception in Washington — and here again we can’t help seeing the specter of September 11, which brought home with devastating force the impossibility of withdrawing from the world’s problems. But all of that in on the periphery here. Ridley Scott’s film — like the acclaimed newspaper serial story by Mark Bowden on which it is based — is essentially concerned with the events themselves, not with interpretation or commentary.

It’s a study in logistics: Its concerns are what, where, and when, not so much who or why. Black Hawk Down isn’t particularly interested with its subjects as characters in a film, which is all to the good. Like Steven Spielberg with Schindler’s List and Amistad , Scott respects his material by depicting it impersonally, with the focus on the event itself rather than some drama of irrelevant "characters" (cf. Titanic or Pearl Harbor ). In fact, Black Hawk Down is the kind of war picture one might have imagined Spielberg himself making, before he actually did make Saving Private Ryan , a film that begins with the anonymity of its famous opening battle sequence before morphing into a sentimental melodrama about characters. In a way, Black Hawk Down is the anti-Ryan: It begins with a lengthy, largely unnecessary prologue feebling attempting to establish one-dimensional characters, then kicks into high gear with the onset of the doomed mission. In my book, it’s a better balance, a purer sort of war picture.

When I reviewed Pearl Harbor , I observed that the big, bloated attack sequence at the film’s center was nearly twice as long as the opening sequence in Ryan , and expressed skepticism whether that kind of intense battle action could ever be sustained for much longer than the twenty or so minutes alloted in Spielberg’s film. Now, having seen Black Hawk Down, I find that it can, if it has structure and clarity. In Scott’s hands, battle isn’t reduced to an exercise in mere chaos or an assemblage of violent incident, but comes as a series of problems to be solved, obstacles to be negotiated, complications to be dealt with. Watching events unfold, we have a basic sense of where people are in relation to one another, where they need to get to, and so on, which at any given moment seems to be all that matters. Scott is a superb visual stylist, and his films are always interesting to look at (even though his last two, Gladiator and Hannibal , weren’t great films).

When he shoots the omimous Black Hawks prowling the airspace above the rooftops from the point of view of militiamen running through buildings and down alleyways, it’s like watching great white sharks drifting over a coral reef while their prey skulk about amid the coral. Though Scott perhaps wisely refrained from reproducing the most hauntingly familiar image from the action in Somalia — that of a dead American Ranger being dragged through the streets by jubilant Somalis — the images he creates are almost as devastating, and seem just as real. Scott also finds moments of terrible humor in the ghastly slapstick of war: In one scene, a Ranger slips and falls as he exits a building — inadvertently ducking beneath a hail of bullets from an ambusher’s gun. The ambusher is a young boy. His gunfire finds another target: a Somali man standing on the other side of the doorway who, judging from the boy’s anguished reaction, may be the boy’s father. Despite fleeting moments such as this, which briefly humanize the enemy, many critics have complained that the Somalis are little more than pop-up targets.

Yet that’s precisely what what one Ranger told Bowden it was really like, comparing the enemy to "silhouettes at target practice." Others have wrung their hands over the vision of hundreds of black Africans being blown away by a crew of (predominantly) white Americans. Yet unless one wishes to argue that this particular event ought not to have been depicted in film — or that the screenplay ought to have imposed a kind of retroactive affirmative action on the soldiers — I fail to see exactly what is being said. Such objections seem to me as misguided as complaints about lack of "characterization" among the soldiers. Even some of the clichéd dialogue, when there was room for it, had for me the ring of truth. When a dying soldier asked a comrade to deliver a message to his loved ones — prompting the inevitable, time-honored reply, "You’ll tell them yourself" — I couldn’t help feeling that this lie must actually be uttered on battlefields all the time. The film inevitably omits vivid details from Mark Bowden’s story.

On the first page of the Inquirer series we read that Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Harnett) went to Mass the morning of the botched operation, and uttered Hail Marys as his men began roping out of the helicopter onto the street below. Later we read about how, when one pilot was captured, the Somalis (fearful of tiny transmitters in his clothing) began to strip him, but were unable to work the unfamiliar plastic snaps on his gear, until the pilot helped them open them. Yet the broad outlines of the story and even many specific details are here, straight out of Bowden. If Scott can’t include the whole wealth of detail Bowden brought to the story, he compensates with the greater visual and auditory immediacy of his medium, bringing us as close as possible to what those soldiers went through in that two-day period in October 1993. It’s a harrowing, unforgettable experience, one unlike any other war picture that has ever been made.

Tags: Black Hawk Down (2001) YIFY - Download Movie TORRENT - YTS Reviewed by ptheus ( [email protected] ) 10 / 10 I Felt Like I Was in that Black Hawk Black Hawk is quite simply the best movie of the year (2001) and the best war movie I have seen. It's an astonishing achievement that puts you right in the middle of the hellish horror faced by U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1993. Every explosion startled me and filled me fear, every gunshot felt like it was whizzing right by me, every mistake or unforeseen event had me on the edge of my seat with stress and anger. I felt as though I had been transported to Mogadishu for 2.5 hours and plopped in the middle of the ambush faced by the 100 or so U.S. Rangers and Delta Force Troops as they set about to capture a Somalian warlord responsible for stealing Red Cross food shipments in his starvation-ravaged country. I really felt this movie, it was tangible to me; the confusion, the fear, the sense of dislocation and horror the soldiers must have faced.

At the end I was emotionally and mentally drained. Ahh emotions, a subject of much debate where this movie is concerned, at least among some critics. While the reviews for Black Hawk Down have on average ranged from "Good to Excellent," there has been persistent and growing criticism over the lack of clearly drawn out characters that the audience could connect with, the lack of historical context, and the fact that movie is all action, with no heart, with no point-of-view. Well I think those who criticize the movie on these grounds, have completely missed the point of the movie, and are flat-out wrong. It is a movie told from the soldiers point-of-view, pure and simple. This is not a political movie, this is not a movie that needs cheap sentimentality or conventional emotional "hooks" for the characters. As much as I liked Saving Private Ryan, the overly sentimental framing device used by Spielberg, really annoyed me. It felt like he was pandering to the audience just a little bit, and it wasn't necessary. Well, there's no pandering here, no cheap sentimentality in Black Hawk Down, just the horrible, gruesome, disorienting reality of modern combat.

I didn't know anyone who worked in the World Trade Center, but I was moved to tears by what happened to them on Sept. 11 and that's the way I felt today in the movie. As far as I am concerned there was plenty of emotion in Black Hawk Down, plenty of "choke-up" moments, or moments when I was moved by the unbelievable courage shown by the soldiers as they faced an almost hopeless situation. I'm not sure how anyone could not be moved by seeing these 18-25 year-old men trapped in the horror of a Civil War that had no bearing on U.S. National Security. As portrayed by the amazing ensemble cast, these men (really boys in many cases) showed the full range of emotions that our soldiers must have gone through, not to mention the fear and confusion of their situation. To me the cast standouts were Josh Hartnett (boy has he got BIG FUTURE STAR written all over him) as Staff Sgt Eversmann and Australian actor Eric Bana as Sgt 1st Class "Hoot." Black Hawk Down is a great movie, and it is an important movie. It is the story of courage and heroism against nearly insurmountable odds.

What happened in Somalia was a foreign policy failure for the U.S., but the actions of the soldiers sent into battle that October day were anything but failure. That there were not more casualties is a credit to them and ultimately a credit to all of us. Reviewed by Edward Douglas (shades033) 10 / 10 One of the best war movies of all time When talking about war movies, there are many great ones that immediately spring to mind. Since the 70's, three of them have formed a bit of a holy trinity: Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. These three movies have set the bar for all other war movies that have come along since then. When it was announced that Gladiator director, Ridley Scott, would be adapting Mark Bowden's book, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War, filmgoers knew that they would be in for a treat. For whatever reason, I don't remember hearing much about the civil war in Somalia or about the Battle of Mogadishu on which Black Hawk Down is based.

The plan seemed simple enough: the Army is sent into Somalia by the government to try to put an end to the Civil War. On October 3, 1993, a group of them were sent on a quick mission to capture the Somali warlord that had been running the country with an iron fist. It didn't take long for the operation to go completely FUBAR as two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Things went from bad to worse, as the Rangers found themselves surrounded by thousands of armed Somalis, whose only goal was to shoot any American soldier that invaded their space. After "stirring up the hornet's nest", the mission becomes a desperate attempt to maintain the Rangers motto, "Leave No Man Behind". Needless to say, Ridley Scott has made the ultimate war movie with Black Hawk Down. Unlike some war films that temper the battle with slower character-building sequences, you have to wait only thirty minutes for the Rangers' mission to go into effect. And the action doesn't stop for the next two hours, as the rest of the movie is filled with flying bullets, explosions and bloodshed.

The fighting is so chaotic that it is hard to follow the action and tell what is happening, at times, and it becomes almost too easy to become desensitized to the violence. By the third time someone yells "RPG's!" though, the entire audience knows to duck and cover their ears. While the American soldiers go in with a solid plan, it doesn't take long for panic to set in, and pretty soon, you're not sure which side is more disorganized. It's amazing to watch what seems like thousands of extras playing the Somali militia swarming over the soldiers, and the action and camerawork is reminiscent of a video game as the soldiers try to escape their precarious situation through the streets of Mogadishu. As the movie progresses, the tension continues to build as the grim and unrelenting hopelessness of the situation sets in both for the soldiers and the viewer. It's pretty amazing how much has been made of the 19 downed American soldiers when over 1000 Somali men, women, and children were killed during the raid.

While the movie is clearly weighed towards the American perspective, I can't imagine how it must have felt to be the guy who gets to play "Dead Somali with a Gun #354". Although characterization has always been used extensively in war movies to get the viewer to care about the characters, Black Hawk Down works better because, for the most part, the soldiers are personified as little more than grunts in the field doing the bidding of their superiors. At least the soldiers had their names taped to their helmets, so that this didn't have the problem of some war movies, where it's sometimes hard to tell who is who. Some of the best performances of the film come from Tom Sizemore as the gung-ho Lt. McKnight and Josh Hartnett, who plays the sergeant who leads the mission and feels personal guilt every time a man is lost. Sam Shepard also is excellent as Major General William Garrison, who sits back in the safe zone watching his doomed men be overpowered by the enemy. Eric Bana's part is small, but he has some of the best lines in the film, really driving home the point of why soldiers do what they do.

Ewan McGregor's role is even more minor and insignificant, but his Trainspotting compatriot, Ewen Bremner offers the movie's little bit of comic relief. As expected in a Ridley Scott film, the visuals and camerawork are stunning with the movie having a gray almost monochromatic look that makes the orange flames and red blood really stand out. As is typical in Scott's recent movies, there is lots of flying dust, rubble and debris mixed with slow motion shots of falling bullet casings and splattered blood. He also uses animals and non-military personnel well in some of the shots to show that this firefight is happening in the middle of a populated market district. A big deal has been made out of the blood and gore in Black Hawk Down, but what is any true war movie without it? Though most of the graphic violence on display is not far beyond Saving Private Ryan, there is at least one visceral sequence that will make most people squeamish, unless they watch those operation shows on The Learning Channel for entertainment. Black Hawk Down is quite an achievement in creating a realistic representation of an event in recent history.

Most of this movie leaves the viewer aghast and incredulous of what they're watching, and it's hard to believe that something like this could possibly happen. Technically, this movie is an amazing feat that gives the viewer one of the most realistic impressions of what it would feel like to be in the middle of a war, which makes the atrocities of the event seem all the more real. In a genre that has brought out some of the best in directors and actors, Black Hawk Down is easily the best war movie ever made, and it has replaced A Beautiful Mind as my candidate for Best Picture and Director.

Rating: 10 out of 10 Reviewed by BettieTeese 5 / 10 Tells it like it is I'm not a fan of war movies usually,but when i sat down to watch Black Hawk Down,i couldn't turn it off.Heres a war movie which doesn't sugar coat.There is no crappy dialogue,no soppy love story tie ins,just the real deal,brutal battle scenes,the gruesome reality of war.Black Hawk Down is based on a true story,the bloody battle at Somalia and it leaves one drained.Its confronting,and exposes war in its true light-there's nothing glamorous to see.In two hours and a bit the viewer is able to imagine being there at the horrible battleground,and suffering like the soldiers did.It really makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be in a free country,relatively peaceful,and not having our lives threatened every second of the day.Everything about BHD is right; the setting of the film,the Somalians,the American soldiers going through hell,the brutality,the battle,the fatalities.Not for the faint hearted,or weak stomached,but a truly powerful,compelling motion picture.Ridley Scott takes the viewer on an imaginative journey through Black Hawk Down and appeals to our emotions.A brutal,yet bearable

 war film.

FILM; War, Without Any Answers - The New York Times The New York Times Movies |FILM; War, Without Any Answers Search FILM; War, Without Any Answers By JAMIE MALANOWSKI Continue reading the main story Correction Appended A WAR movie may or may not succeed as an entertainment vehicle, but it almost always serves the purpose of telling us how we're feeling -- or ought to feel -- about war itself: proud, sorrowful, ashamed, angry, resolute. The films usually are part of the times that produce them. ''The Longest Day,'' about the Allied landing in Normandy, made by the World War II generation during the cold war, told us that our cause was just and our men were heroic. Most of the Vietnam War films, like ''Platoon'' and ''Coming Home,'' and many World War I films, like ''Gallipoli'' and ''Paths of Glory,'' tell us about governments that have broken faith with their soldiers and wasted their courage. Appearing in a decade rife with spin, ''Saving Private Ryan'' told us that nothing was more authentic than a soldier's sacrifice.

It is paradoxical, then, at a moment when America is at war and the country is feeling especially justified about its prosecution, that one of the central creative principles behind ''Black Hawk Down,'' a film whose production was bisected by Sept. 11, was the determination not to tell the audience how to feel. ''I don't want to give the audience any answers,'' says the film's director, Ridley Scott. ''I want them to go away and think, 'This isn't a movie movie.' It's as near to the edge of a documentary as I could make it.'' ''Black Hawk Down'' tells the story of the Oct. 3, 1993, raid by Army Rangers and the elite Army Delta Force to capture two deputies of the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu, Somalia. Although the deputies were successfully captured, what had been planned as a quick-hitting, hopefully antiseptic strike turned into a hard-fought 15-hour gun battle in which perhaps 500 Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed and two of the fearsome, seemingly invincible Black Hawk helicopters shot down.

Troops were sent there mainly to help the United Nations make sure that food supplies sent to the famine-stricken nation were fairly distributed and not stolen by the gunmen. After the battle, President Bill Clinton ordered a withdrawal from Somalia within six months. Continue reading the main story The film, which opens on Dec. 28 in New York and Los Angeles, marks the third life for this story. The first was in the immediate news accounts and the reaction to them, which focused not only on the casualties, but also on how the body of a dead American soldier was stripped and dragged about the streets. The raid was seen by many as a debacle, and an example of America's irresolution. Later, Mark Bowden, a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, re-examined the battle in scrupulous detail, first for his newspaper and then in his best-selling book, ''Black Hawk Down.'' His reporting focused squarely on the battle and the soldiers, depicting them as valorous, well-trained and successful in the face of terrible complications. Advertisement Continue reading the main story ''It goes to show you how context is everything,'' says Mr. Bowden.

''If tomorrow you read that we captured two of Osama bin Laden's key advisers and killed and wounded 1,000 of Al Qaeda, and in the process lost 18 men, you'd think they'd done a helluva job.'' The film's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, bought the rights to the book while it was still in galleys. ''It was fascinating to get so deep inside a military operation,'' Mr. Bruckheimer says of his attraction to the material. ''And I was struck by the heroism of the young soldiers.'' Originally, Simon West was to direct, but when he became caught up with ''Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,'' Mr. Bruckheimer approached Mr. Scott. ''I thought this sounded like the ideal way to do a war film,'' said Mr. Scott, who had just completed ''Gladiator'' and ''Hannibal'' and was looking for a project more grounded in reality. ''And I thought, if you're going to do it, and it's going to be about war, it can't be sentimentalized in any form. That's why I wanted to take out of it all the usual references to home and family.'' Mr.

Bowden's book revealed the personal information and histories of the soldiers sparingly, but the film cuts that information back even more. A 20-minute sequence before the raid differentiates the characters, but Mr. Scott metes this material out with a coffee spoon, not a trowel; this is not one of those platoon movies in which Louie speaks longingly of his girlfriend back in Flatbush or Tex dreams of owning a spread by the Rio Grande. ''It seemed to me that the film had to be an anatomy of the military process,'' says Mr. Scott. ''That's why there's no fat in the picture. The beginning is about, and only about, telling you background that you need to know for the raid. It's not about home, it's all about what we're going to do today, today, today. And then, through that tight focus, you can see that the picture is more about courage under fire, which is about functioning under fire. Real courage comes from people who are under fire and who function though under the pall of fear. The guy who is not afraid may not be wholly courageous. He may just be a lunatic.'' The story was compelling, but also enormously complicated.

The raid followed a plan familiar to the troops: Black Hawk helicopters would drop the soldiers outside a building where they had been informed Aidid's men were staying. Some troops would seize the men while others guarded a perimeter. A convoy of Humvees would then rumble in from the outskirts of town and take everybody to safety. The operation was supposed to last an hour from start to finish; many men didn't even bother to carry canteens. But first one helicopter, and then another, was shot down. A pilot was dead; the other soldiers needed rescuing. The timing of the operation became disrupted. The convoy got misdirected. Aidid's supporters -- and this fight was in his stronghold -- rallied to the scene. The troops, by refusing to abandon the dead pilot, prolonged the fight, which led to the perception that the mission had failed. ''The biggest challenge with this film,'' says Mr. Scott, ''was getting all the through lines clear, so you can sit there and take it all in. When you read the book, you can actually read, put down, read, put down. You've got time to think, digest, distill.

In this story, there were always 4 or 5 or 50 things happening at once, simultaneous action. The tendency on the part of the audience, when we cut from one scene to another, is to think in terms of sequence, in cause and effect. But it's not always like that. Complexity in a story is good, but density bores an audience. So we had to go through the screenplay, over and over again, to make sure people could understand what was happening.'' Further complicating the adaptation was the sheer number of soldiers who took part; about 100 protected the first downed helicopter, but a movie can't handle anywhere near that number of characters. People and events had to be conflated. Josh Hartnett, for example, plays Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann, and through his young and inexperienced eyes we get one perspective on the events. In reality, Sergeant Eversmann participated only in the beginning of the battle, and then was evacuated. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The Army, which was highly cooperative with the filmmakers, had requests as well. Ewan MacGregor plays a character named Grimes, a company clerk seeing his first action.

The story is true, but the soldier's name was John Stebbins, not Grimes. ''As it happened, Stebbins got in trouble with the law,'' explains Mr. Bowden, who wrote the original draft of the screenplay, which is now credited to Ken Nolan and Steven Zaillian. ''The Army asked us to change the name.'' Another character's name was changed, but for a very different reason. Eric Bana, an Australian actor, plays a Delta Force sergeant named Hoot. Because the Delta Force operates covertly, the Army thought it would be wiser not to have this man's identity on movie screens worldwide, even though his real name appears in the book. As it happens, the real Hoot seems astonishingly like a Hollywood creation. ''He's unbelievably fit,'' says Mr. Bruckheimer, ''wears these Oakley sunglasses all the time, lives in an apartment with no furniture, sleeps on the floor in a sleeping bag. And he has a medical degree. I assume he's there in Afghanistan now.'' Once the characters were delineated, there was a further complication. ''When I first saw them all standing together,'' says Mr.

Scott, ''they were all in their uniforms, all with their helmets and goggles, and I broke out into a sweat. They all looked the same! The same! I said, 'We've got to write their names on their helmets,' and the military adviser, whose job it is to make sure we do everything authentically, said, 'Oh, no, we don't do that.' I said, 'Sorry, mate, they're going to have names on the helmets in this war.' '' THE resemblance -- literally, the uniformity -- could have been combated by casting more well-known actors; familiar faces help audiences follow the action. But the filmmakers chose not to do that. ''You could have gotten better-known actors,'' says Mr. Bruckheimer, ''but it's hard to get guys that age who are well known. And if they are, it's because of television, which changes the reality of what you're presenting in a different way.'' In his effort to be authentic and unsentimental, Mr. Scott depicts combat graphically, including the ghastly consequences to a body when it is pierced by an antitank missile that does not explode. But he does from time to time turn away.

If Americans remember anything of the raid itself, it is the terrible images of Somalis dragging around the corpse of an American soldier. The film depicts the event only to a point. ''They went for the clothing first, because it was valuable, and like a trophy,'' says Mr. Scott, who was not a military man but whose father was an officer with the Royal Engineers during World War II. ''I didn't think you needed to see anymore. Could you make it worse? Absolutely. But did those men have families? Yes. I didn't want anyone to go through that again.'' The judicious editing does not diminish the accuracy of the depiction. ''It was interesting to watch Ridley and Jerry work together,'' says Mr. Bowden. ''Ridley is a gritty director, often with a very dark view of things. And Jerry is like Norman Rockwell, always ready to tap into the familiar strains of emotion and affection.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story The two men feel that they have had a beneficial effect on one another. ''We're both aware that he's got the reputation of being too sentimental, and I've got the reputation of being too dark,'' says Mr. Scott.

''So I tried to come to the center, and that meant trying just to be more realistic, more journalistic. Who are these guys? What do they really go through? Why are they really there?'' As in all war movies, these questions are eventually answered, though in keeping with the general thrust of the film, these epiphanies are tersely worded. ''Hoot says it,'' says Mr. Scott. ''It's all about the guy next to you. Once that bullet goes past your head, politics goes out the window, and it's really about the man next to you. And that's where this ethic of leaving no man behind comes from. I loved that idea.'' The most unexpected complication was, of course, Sept. 11. At the time of the attacks, the film was scheduled to be released next March. In the aftermath, Mr. Scott and Mr. Bruckheimer wondered whether this would be a film that audiences would be in a mood to see even then.

One way they tried to fit the picture into the new context was by adding a postscript that suggested that Washington's decision to withdraw from Somalia after this battle, as well as its decision not to intervene with infantry in troubled places like Rwanda and Bosnia, was part of a reluctance to wage war that eventually emboldened America's enemies to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. That postscript was dropped. Eventually, the filmmakers decided that the movie would find its audience. ''We concluded that this was a good time,'' says Mr. Scott. ''We saw that these soldiers were like the firefighters and the police officers and the rescue workers, in that they are all people who would go into burning buildings or under fire without thinking of themselves, but only about their duty. ''And from a filmmaking view, my duty was to the soldier who was there, to make the film as accurate as I can, to render the experience of face-to-face fighting as realistically as I can. That was my job.'' Correction: December 23, 2001, Sunday An article last Sunday about the film ''Black Hawk Down'' included an outdated screenplay credit. The screenplay is credited to Ken Nolan, no longer with Steven Zaillian.

Question: The 2001 film 'Black Hawk Down' told the story of a US military campaign in which country?
Answer: SOMALIA